Marco Rubio gave a speech to the Munich Security Conference in which he extolled an ideal said to be out of fashion.
“We are part of one civilisation: Western civilisation,” the US secretary of state told his largely European audience. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds nations can share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry and the sacrifices our forefathers made for the common civilisation to which we have fallen heir.”
The speech received a standing ovation.
What, exactly, is Western civilisation? Americans younger than 50 might be excused for hardly knowing. A 2011 report from the National Association of Scholars found that none of America’s top colleges required a survey course in Western civilisation and only 32% even offered it as an elective. In 1964, 80% of these institutions had some introduction to Western civilisation.
What many universities do offer is what amounts to an education in anti-Western civilisation: examining how the West is portrayed as an extended act of imperialism and colonialism, human exploitation and environmental destruction, misogyny and white supremacy, alongside phobias of every kind.
This pedagogy of civilisational self-loathing — some justified and overdue, much distorted by factual fudging and decontextualised judgments — has done three kinds of damage.
First, it helped produce a generation of self-certain progressives, including pro-Hamas demonstrators during the Gaza war, who appear only dimly aware that they are the very people they are taught to despise. Who is more of a settler-colonialist — a Protestant, white, English-speaking undergraduate in Los Angeles or a Jewish, Mizrahi, Hebrew-speaking one in Jerusalem? And does a typical Hamas militant despise a fervent Christian evangelical any more than an anti-Zionist trans activist?
Second, it has fuelled reactionary conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic. This includes figures such as Alexander Gauland, a founder of Germany’s Alternative for Germany party, who dismissed the Holocaust as merely a stain on more than 1,000 years of successful German history. It also includes JD Vance, the US vice president, who last year met an AfD leader after criticising an audience in Munich for refusing to respect free speech or election results.
The worst damage, however, is to ordinary citizens in modern democracies who, unless they have sought it out themselves, lack a clear understanding of what the West stands for. It is what Robert Maynard Hutchins once called “The Great Conversation”.
It is the exchange between Plato and Aristotle, Locke and Rousseau, Keynes and Hayek. It reflects the tension between revelation and reason, theory and observation, the ancient and the modern, the familiar and the foreign. It is a tradition that seeks deeper understanding through continuously challenging its own beliefs and methods. At its best, it values questions more than answers and the freedom to question above all.
Like virtually every other civilisation, the West has centuries of cruelty to its name. Unlike many others — also guilty of cruelty — the West is responsible for an outsized share of modern society’s benefits: lifesaving science, life-easing technology, civil and human rights, democracy, tolerance for nonconformity and a notable capacity for historical remorse. However impolite it may now be to say so, this is not equally true of all civilisations. Where, for instance, is China’s state monument to the millions who died in Mao’s Great Famine?
This is not an argument that Westerners are inherently superior to others. Nor is it an argument to sanitise Western history. It is, instead, an argument that the West offers a superior way of organising society, especially compared with civilisations that treat disagreement as heresy and suppress demonstrations with violence. Confronting such systems, whether centred in Moscow, Tehran or Beijing, requires two things: pride in who we are and a serious understanding of what we represent.
Today, the West lacks both. The progressive left that condemns Western civilisation as white supremacy is as misguided as the alt-right that celebrates Western civilisation for the same reason.
This helps explain the enthusiastic reception to Rubio’s speech, despite the administration he represents.
The West is not an invented concept designed to oppress others. It is a civilisation worth defending, not only for those already within it but for everyone. The least we can do is explain to our children what it represents.
Isn’t that what college once existed to do?
The New York Times